


More

by pprfaith



Series: Yellow Car [3]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Family, Pre-Canon, Pregnancy, Romance, Underage Emma, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 13:06:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2230107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In any given Universe, Henry must be born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, look what I found languishing in my Unfinished file!
> 
> Not betaed.

+

Emma is acting strange.

She has been all day, and for the last three or four days as well.

Killian is at a loss to be honest. The last time he dealt with a female’s temper was several human lifetimes ago and Milah was usually easily pacified with something shiny or some new adventure.

He’s applied similar techniques to Emma a time or two, but generally speaking, if that girl wants something, she simply steals it for herself and doesn’t wait for him to bring it to her. The same goes for adventures. She was the one that started their continuous game of ‘how many wallets can you pick in twenty minutes?’. 

So it’s not that.

And anyway, she’s been happy since he told her about magic and Neverland. Whether that’s because he’s been honest with her, or because everything she’s ever dreamed of turned out to be real, he doesn’t know. 

But he’s caught her, more than once, with the star in hand, staring at it as it dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened.

“You have magic,” he told her and she took it and ran with it like the brilliant, brilliant woman she is. 

The star already obeys her commands and he is afraid of what she will attempt next. Killian’s only magic rests buried deep in his hook and is only good for one heart. He can’t guide her in this at all.

She’ll find her way, though, he has no doubt of that. It’s what she has done all her life. 

Emma Swan, seventeen years old and every bit as broken as this old, bitter pirate, but stronger for it. He didn’t lie when he told her she shines brighter than any Neverland star. 

It’s no wonder he’s fallen in love with her.

He never thought he would again, after Milah, but there she was, saving him, smiling at him, matching him. Looking at his hook and seeing the weapon and the necessity instead of the horror. 

His Emma is, as she would say, one tough cookie.

Which makes her strange behavior all the more unsettling. 

Half an hour ago she came banging into the motel room they are staying in at the moment – legally and fully paid for, for once, yesterday was a good haul – with a plastic container full of juice in one hand and a paper bag in the other. She slammed the door to the bathroom with a curse and hasn’t made a sound since. 

Three hundred years of plotting revenge have taught Killian patience, but he’s reached the end of his.

“Love, let me in,” he demands, rapping at the door with his hook. It’s not locked, which is the only reason he hasn’t broken it down yet.

“Come in,” she finally sighs and he finds her sitting on the lid of the toilet – strange things, those – pointing at something on the chipped counter. He frowns and picks it up, trying to figure out its purpose. Ever since he told her the truth, she’s had too much fun making him guess at the peculiarities of this world.

“What does it do?” he finally asks, if only to let her have her little victory.

She quirks a wicked, wicked smile at him. “You pee on it,” she announces. 

He drops it like it’s on fire, rushes to the sink and starts scrubbing his hand with a litany of curses, all the while glaring at her. She’s pressing one hand to her mouth, giggling. At least someone is having fun. 

Except when he’s dried his hands she’s still giggling and when he opens his mouth to demand why on earth she would piss on a stick, she’s still giggling and there’s an edge to it, a sharpness that he’s never heard before. 

“It tells you if you’re pregnant,” she finally gasps between giggles and Killian… stops. 

Stops moving, stops breathing, stops blinking, because… stops.

…

“-llian? Killian? _Hook_!”

He breathes. “What? I… are you?”

She’s standing in front of him suddenly, close enough that he can see how wide her eyes are, how afraid she is, and he just reels her in, wraps both his arms around her shoulders and holds her tightly to his body.

“Pregnant?” she whispers. “Yes.”

+

Three hundred years and the issue never came up. Neverland, for reasons unknown, is not conductive to reproduction. Maybe it has to do with why no-one there ages, with the stagnation that rules that blasted place. Maybe it’s the magic there.

And before that… it was never an issue with Milah. He knew she loved her Bae, her lost son, and he also knew that she had hated being a mother as much as she had hated being a wife. 

He never married her and he never gave her children she did not want and that was the end of it.

And now… pregnant. 

Emma is going to have a child, is going to be a mother.

And he is going to be a father.

How did he go from hunting down his Crocodile to falling in love with a woman who is going to have his child?

How can he find the Crocodile, how can he _fight_ him, with a woman and a babe in tow? With so much on the line, so much to lose? He brought only himself to this world, only what he _needed_ to kill the coward and instead he found something completely different.

He has a sudden vision of finding the Crocodile, only for the monster to take Emma and their babe, rip out both their hearts as punishment. Cora and the Queen both told him there would be no magic in this world and he counted on that when he slunk out of the Queen’s palace to leave mother and daughter to their games, when he came here.

But now there is Emma and the star around her neck that pulses in time with her heartbeat and he’s not so sure anymore.

If the coward has power, if he has magic, if Killian ever brings Emma and the baby within a hundred miles of him…

Can he leave Emma?

No.

Even after only a few months with her, the answer is so solid, it might as well be writ in stone. He may be a fool, but he is an honest one, at least in the silence of his head. He knows who he is and he knows that he’s a tenacious bastard when he wants something. He wants Emma. So will he leave her?

No.

But he’s not sure he can stop hunting the Crocodile either. 

+

“How long?” he asks, hours later, after she’s finished crying and they’re both… well, they’re both grinning like idiots, just a little. 

She shrugs into her soda. “I figure about eight weeks.”

“So we have time.”

“Time for what?”

He gives her a long look. “Hand to mouth isn’t going to be good enough anymore, is it, love? Hard to run from the guards when you’re carrying a babe in your belly.”

“Cops,” she corrects, automatically. “They’re called cops.”

He waves her off. He’s been watching his speech less and less around her and he knows she takes wicked pleasure in correcting him and his slipping accent, both. 

Emma scrubs a hand over her face and shakes her head. “God. Shit. I’m gonna,” she makes a gesture that he supposes means ‘going to get really big’. “I’m a seventeen-year-old thief without a GED on the run with my illegal-alien boyfriend from Neverland. Oh my god, what are we even going to name the kid? Swan? Hook? I’m going to be a teenage pregnancy statistic with a baby called Hook!”

Great, she’s panicking again.

If this is what the next seven months are going to be like then… he’s still strangely looking forward to it. Bloody hell, but the woman has turned his life in its ear. Up is down and left is right and for the first time since he lost everything, revenge is not the first and last thing on his mind every day. 

“Jones, love. The babe would be called Jones. And you can name it anything you want, as long as you stop getting hysterical.”

She glares. “I am not hysterical! I am having Captain Hook’s love child. I am entitled to a little…a little frustration!”

She says it loudly enough that a mother with a toddler a few tables down stops and stares. Killian flashes her his most charming smile, followed closely by his hook. She turns pale and goes back to pacifying her bad-mannered child. 

He doesn’t bother dropping the smile as he turns back to Emma. “In other words, you are getting hysterical.”

She kicks him. Hard. 

He might deserve it.

+

A week later they are still in that same motel room, paying for it legally. It’s fast draining their funds, but once he put that flea in her ear, Emma has quickly gotten insistent. 

She still picks pockets for fun, though. 

Really, her moral compass might be as bloody broken as his own.

He breezes into the room with take-away dinner, only to be met by a list thrust under his nose. 

“What’s that?”

“Things we need to fix,” she informs him primly, before grabbing the bags and starting to sort through them. She goes a bit green when she finds his pork. Since he is particularly fond of that dish, he makes a quick grab and places it out of her reach. She’s liable to flush it down the toilet otherwise. 

Pregnancy, he has found, might be stranger than the strangest creatures he has seen in all his years in Neverland. 

With his dinner saved, he turns to the list. On it are several bullet points. They read _legal car, job, apartment, health care._

And underneath, in bold letters, retraced multiple times is one other word. 

_Money_.

When he looks back up, Emma is staring dejectedly at him. “We can’t do it, can we?”

“Do what, love?”

“This!” she yells, hands going to her stomach until she notices what she’s doing and removes them like they’re on fire. “We need to make sure the baby’s alright, so I need to see a doctor, and take vitamins and stuff and that costs money. To get money, you need a job. To get a job, you need an address and to have an address, you need a place to live, which you can’t get without money.”

“We can get money.”

“Not enough! Apartments have down payments. We’ve been robbing half the city blind. We need to be careful! I am not having this baby in jail!”

Suddenly she slumps, fight going out of her as quickly as it went in. “I’m not having this baby at all, am I?”

¬“Of course you… we are,” he corrects her and himself both. They are, not she is. She’s far too used to being alone, far too self reliant. Far too familiar with abandonment and having to do things herself. She doesn’t know how to ask for things any more than he does.

She just goes and takes them, steals them, cons someone into willingly giving them to her. 

Just like him.

He’s terrified, sometimes, how much they are alike because it means there are no secrets and no walls between them. 

If Emma ever decides to cut him, he’ll bleed.

He should have left her, that first day, after she bought him dinner. Before even. The moment he met her, he should have walked away because he could bloody well see himself looking out of her cool, green eyes.

But she was a thief and a liar and smart as a whip so he held onto her. He thought he conned her into teaching him how to drive for exactly two hours before he caught her wry smile and realized that she was playing with him as much as he was playing with her.

And then she looked at him, far too close, far too seeing, and taught him how to steal a room for a night and…

He shouldn’t have kissed her. 

She’s a girl, barely a woman, and he’s an old, bitter man. 

But he couldn’t. More so, he didn’t want to. Emma steals whatever she wants, but he does, too. And he wanted her. 

So he told her to close her eyes so he didn’t have to see himself reflected in them and he kissed her.

And now here they are, two separate, greedy, _proud_ people, damaged people, and in her belly a combination of them both grows and just this morning he caught himself wondering if the babe will have his eyes or hers.

That was roughly when he realized that he’s in far too deep. 

“Emma,” he says. “Emma, look at me.”

She does. 

She crashes into his chest, wraps her arms around him and cries and cries and cries.

“I hope he has your eyes,” she whispers eventually, when his precious pork has long since gone cold, and he laughs because of course, of course she wonders, too.

He kisses the crown of her head. “I hope she has yours.”

“It’s a boy,” she tells him, firmly.

“It’s a girl,” he rebuts, and adds, before she can pick a fight, “And I may have something stored away to help us.”

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Uh-oh. Suddenly there was plot!


End file.
